A team of forward-thinking aerodynamicists at the University of Arizona are designing a sailplane that could be the first fixed-wing craft to fly the Martian skies, this according to Gizmodo, which profiled the engineers behind the project. The first flight on Mars, belongs, of course, to Ingenuity, NASA’s cool little helicopter that flew last year and has proceeded to exceed the space agency’s wildest expectations. The problem with Martian flight is that the air on the Red Planet is extremely thin, so airfoils produce only so much lift. So any sailplane that flies on Mars would have to have an enormous wingspan—the U of A design features an 11-foot-plus span and weighs just four pounds. One advantage of the Martian atmosphere is that it’s windy, which would theoretically allow such a design to soar, possibly for hours at a time and much farther from base than a small helicopter can.
